Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

copyright is not the same as piracy

piracy isn't a thing, except on the high seas. what you're thinking about is copyright violation.

Can you explain why? What makes them categorically different or at the very least why is "piracy" quantitatively worse than 'just' copyright violation?

Yup, piracy sounds better than copyright violation.

“Piracy” is mostly a rhetorical term in the context of copyright. Legally, it’s still called infringement or unauthorized copying. But industries and lobbying groups (e.g., RIAA, MPAA) have favored “piracy” for its emotional weight.

Emotional weight or because it's intentionally misleading.

Piracy is theft - you have taken something and deprived the original owner of it.

Copyright infringement is unauthorized reproduction - you have made a copy of something, but you have not deprived the original owner of it. At most, you denied them revenue although generally less than the offended party claims, since not all instances of copying would have otherwise resulted in a sale.

Saying that piracy isn't copyright violation is an RMS talking point. It's not worth trying to ask why because the answer will be RMS said so and will not be backed by the common usage of the word.

You legitimately have it completely backwards. The word "piracy" was coopted to put a more severe spin on copyright violation. As a result, it became "the common usage of the word". But that was by design. And it's worth pushing back on.

Maybe the most memorable version of the response is this the "Copying is not Theft" song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

Asked unironically: "What's worse, hijacking ships at sea and holding their crews hostage for ransom on threat of death, or downloading a song off the internet?" ...

Does piracy have negative connotations? I thought everyone thought pirates were cool

I have about the same concept of piracy these days.

Real piracy always involves booty.

Naturally booty is wealth that has been hoarded.

Has nothing to do with wealth that may or may not come in the future, regardless of whether any losses due to piracy have taken place already or not.

Sweden has a political party called "The Pirate Party"(1), and "The Pirate Bay" is Swedish so I think a couple of Swedes memeing before it was cool has a significant impact on making the name stick but also taking the seriousness out of it.

1: https://piratpartiet.se/en/

I don't have it backwards. Language evolved, and piracy got a new definition. It's even in the dictionary. Trying to redefine words like this is futile and avoiding certain words or replacing them with others is a quirk that RMS has.

Yes, and the struggle with this back in the day was the *IAA and related organizations wanted to equate infringement with theft.

And to be clear, we javelin the word infringement precisely because it is not theft.

In addition to the deprived revenue, piracy also improves on the general relevance the author has or may have in the public sphere. Essentially, one of the side effects of piracy is basically advertising.

Doctorow was one of the early ones to bring this aspect of it up.

> RMS

Referring to this? (Wikipedia's disambiguation page doesn't seem to have a more likely article.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Copyright_red...

Yes, quoting the following section:

    Stallman places great importance on the words and labels people use to talk about the world, including the relationship between software and freedom. He asks people to say free software and GNU/Linux, and to avoid the terms intellectual property and piracy (in relation to copying not approved by the publisher). One of his criteria for giving an interview to a journalist is that the journalist agrees to use his terminology throughout the article.

Everyone but the person(s) affected by the pirates, I suppose.

That seems rather agreeable, though. Stallman is essentially saying that words are meaningful and speakers/writers should be thoughtful about the meaning of the words they use. In that context, refusing to use terms like "intellectual property" and "piracy" because of their meaning and the effect their use has on culture, and especially insisting that journalists who interview you use the same language, seems to be a means of controlling the interpreted meaning of one's expressions.

(As an aside, it seems pointless to decry it as a "talking point". The reason it was brought up is presumably because the author agrees with it and thinks it's relevant. It's also entirely possible that the author, like me, made this argument without being aware that it was popularized by Richard Stallman. If it makes sense then you can hear the argument without hearing the person and still find it agreeable.)

"Piracy" is used to refer to copyright violation to make it sound scary and dangerous to people who don't know better or otherwise don't think about it too hard. Just imagine if they called it "banditry" instead; now tell me that pirates are not bandits with boats. They may as well have called it banditry and it's worth correcting that. (I also think it's worth ridiculing but that doesn't appear to be Stallman's primary point.) It's not banditry (how ridiculous would it be to call it that?), it's copyright infringement.

Edit:

Reading my comment again in the context of other things you wrote, I suspect the argument will not pass muster because you do not seem to see piracy's change in meaning as manufactured by PR work purchased by media industry leaders. I'm not really trying to convince you that it's true but it may be worth considering that it is the fundamental disagreement you seem to have with others on Stallman's point; again, not saying you're wrong, just that's where the disagreement is.

My point is that the 2 commenters are working off of different definitions. One is using the common definitions of words in English and the other is trying to advocate for their ideological rooted definitions by trying to correct people who use the normal English definitions. 99% of the time how this will play out is the idealog will preach about their values instead of acknowledging that they are purposefully using different definitions.

In short the post is bait.

> In short the post is bait.

This is an uncharitable interpretation. The ostensible point of the comment, or at least a stronger and still-reasonable interpretation, is that they are trying to point out that this specific word choice confuses concepts, which it does. Richard Stallman and the commenter in question are absolutely correct to point that out. You actually seem to be agreeing with Stallman, at least in the abstract.

It's should be acknowledged how/why the meaning of the word changed. As I said, that seems to have been manufactured, which suggests, at least to me, that their (and Richard Stallman's) point is essentially the same as yours. That is to say, the US media industry started paying PR firms to use "piracy" as meaning something other than its normal definition until that became the common definition.

They should not purposely use a different definition like that. That is Stallman's point, and why he refuses to say "piracy" instead of "copyright infringement"; ocean banditry is not copyright infringement and it is confusing -- intentionally so -- to say that it is.

Really that is just the hollywood version of pirates

I'll also point out that the Nazi hunters were able to bring the fugitive nazis to justice because the nazis were declared as pirates aka "enemies of humanity"

File sharing is not that.